first year completed....two to go

sorry for lack of response... been super busy this year, finished wedding and all its planning, first year of graduate school and now resting for another school year starting.... NEXT WEEK!

Will be starting this back up again along with a new blog.... with my daily look living cheap yet sustainable as possible!

coming soon!

The states Ive visited

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Environmental Justice

Smelser, N. J., and P. B. Baltes. "Scale in Geography." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001, 13501-3504.

Williams, Robert W. "The Contested Terrain of Environmental Justice Research: Community as Unit of Analysis." The Social Science Journal 36, no. 2` (1999): 313-28.

 Environmental justice research sparked a comparison to a project of windy ridge neighborhood. The readings had many parallel stories to that area, My understanding is if these lands are being zoned to house the poor as they are not important, where are the planners, and what have they been doing. My understanding was very confused by the reading but I believe in Environmental Justice as seeing from urban perspective living in Chicago for four years, Neighborhoods in south side being affected by zoning where factories were changing zoning displacing the poor to west side. However census data was affected by that as more people were being displaced, that the zip codes were used to get a broader perspective. I hate the word “gentrification” because in reality it moves the poor out without helping them. The term discrimination will pop into the problem, causing issues. Terminology is an issue at play here, for example I do not understand the purpose of “white, black,” is the census not politically correct or discrimination is at play?

Spatial Demography

De Castro, Marcia Caldas. "Spatial Demography: An Opportunity to Improve Policy Making at Diverse Decision Levels." Springer Science+Business Medi 2007 (September 6, 2007): 477-503.

Voss, Paul R. "Demography as a Spatial Social Science." Springer Science+Business Media 2007 (September 25, 2007): 457-71.

This readings was merely suggestion of how history plays a huge role on spatial demography and the importance of this. I believe it has a great role as we need to understand how our population lives and with birth rates and mortality rates. However my concern lies with how it will be used. Id rather it use for the good, but at same time it can have negative results. It was good to see a table but I wish there were examples of how each one is being used. Being a visual person, and potential planner, will I use all these tools or are they used for research only?

I like to think that with Geography major, I am growing into this field I have been able to start the “ability to think spatially” as Castro was saying, I want to see the meaning of recent events such as recession that affected our economy. How does the role of recession help migration, especially in the “new south,” as many northerners moving here in droves since 2000 census. Even the latest low levels of crime, is it because of policing or is it because people are out actively looking for jobs? Just some thoughts...

How would policy making play in a role, for instance social security, many politicians don’t dare to touch the topic but we know the system needs to be taken care of?

How radical are we becoming taking from traditional models of quantitative demography?

What is a plan?

According to Webster dictionary, a plan is a detailed proposal that provides structure and diagram of something to be arraigned. with urban planning, we are expected to plan and provide an sequence of how we will get there. There is a understanding that to accomplish something, there are steps to be made. This is the case in MMC neighborhood that is now already in “train passed” stage where once you are on, there is no going back.

There is a reason why they want that because what if someone new came into the meetings, the vibe and the existing issues may be lost. The concern is there to keep forward movement going in hopes a resolution is being made. 

The readings this week discussed several examples of plans that have been case studies and examples of what happened in centuries past. The first one I studied quite a bit growing up in Chicago suburbs. Chicago itself is a large history textbook and many field trips to the city, I can say I understand the history very well or recall of something that happened with planning, the chicago plan 1909 also known as the beautification plan. While there are few evident of the plan but it helped the shape the city’s future. The goal was to bring people back to the city and live there while working, i.e. beauty in the city life. the failure was not of the plan but of the tax base at the time was not sufficient to build grand ideas from the plan.

The readings also mentioned “good planning must be distinguishable from bad” by listing several important things agenda, policy and visions. The vision part I believe should be by action of the people, which are the residents that should help make a vision. If there is no vision participation ie Villa heights/belmont neighborhood. The city made a plan and the residents had no say to it and it ended up being so bad that the city had to pay outside planning company to take over. The city of Charlotte made a mistake of not involving the residence, thus I wonder if the relationship between the residents and city since then have healed? There was no neighborhood organization, as we had to start from scratch. We had to help make a vision while finding future agenda for the next semester

Bad design plan would be not taking all three main points that is in triangle here and utilizing them to create a good plan. Last semester was my first semester learning how planning worked. One of the neighborhoods, Farm Pond needed an agenda as

undergrad students. Truth be told I was terrified and still terrified that the undergrads would/will fail this. Our group was very proficient on what we did and became very close in the end. We did what we could do to help Judith in the end, making sure there were stuff for her to give out and show them how amazing the neighborhood is. The goal as I felt was a good start and accomplished in the beginning by getting their vision and agenda. As for Policy, I think we introduced in near the end but never got to finish the conversation which I hope is continued in the next neighborhood meetings. I am very excited to see Farm Pond grow and hopefully the plan we executed will become the good plan with many more pages being added.

The plan I am very interested in and I hope to do more is hybrid plans as they combine land use, verbal and classification into one plan. I wonder what other peers would use if they had to pick? Is this by choice or is this told to us as a planner? Just out of curiosity.